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Welcome back to Wall Power’s Inner Circle. I’m Marion
Maneker.
Elizabeth Dee started the Independent Art Fair 15 years ago as a curatorially focused event for galleries to launch and advance individual artists’ work. Last week, the Independent announced big news: Its 20th Century fair will be moving into the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s headquarters, in September 2026, putting a respected art fair and a major auction house under one roof. Today, my conversation with Elizabeth on how this came about and where she sees
it going.
But first… |
- Art market says “I’m not dead yet” with a $100M Karpidas sale: Sotheby’s was obviously very conservative with its presale estimate for the evening sale of Pauline Karpidas’s surrealism collection, which it pegged at $53 million. Instead, the first tranche from Karpidas’s London home went for a total of $100 million, with two more sales to go. Yes, some early lowballing may have skewed expectations—the auction houses have developed a habit of
assigning preposterously low estimates to works by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. In the end, nine works by the couple made $18.5 million against a combined estimate of $2.6 million. But other items sold well, too, with 23 surrealist works bringing in more than $41 million—an indication of just how much pent-up demand there is in this market.
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- Sotheby’s lands the Lauder collection: When Leonard Lauder died earlier this year, it was assumed that the cosmetics billionaire and noted philanthropist’s art holdings would find their way into museums, like the Metropolitan or the Whitney—to which he’d already made major donations—or some other philanthropic project, or even stay within the family. About a month ago, I began to hear chatter that Lauder family representatives were entertaining proposals
from each of the auction houses, though it seemed like a decision would take some time. On Monday, however, the Lauders went to The New York Times with the news that they had chosen Sotheby’s for the $400 million, 55-lot collection. The most noteworthy works will be sold in a 24-lot dedicated single-owner sale on November 18, and the proceeds will go to the Lauder trust, according to its spokesperson.
The spokesperson also noted that Sotheby’s purchase of the Breuer Building
played a role in the decision. I wondered what that meant. Obviously, a purpose-built landmarked structure had few potential buyers, but Sotheby’s seemed to have paid a decent price. Is it possible that the comment meant that, as with Alfred Taubman’s collection a decade ago, it might have seemed odd if Lauder’s heirs chose to not sell his art at a building he was so closely associated with, now that it’s home to an auction house?
Either way, let’s hope the extra leverage
gave Sotheby’s some wiggle room on the guarantee. The collection, as revealed on Monday, is extremely top-heavy—concentrated in three important works by one artist: Gustav Klimt. On paper, these Klimts should be easy to move. There are strong public and private nine-figure comparables for Klimt’s work, including two recent sales over $100 million. That said, Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, from 1914-16, is estimated at $150 million. The Blooming Meadow
landscape from 1908 has an $80 million target price, and Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee, from 1916, carries a slightly lower price at $70 million.
Meanwhile, there is talk in the private market—some of which I have confirmed, some of which is rumor—about a handful of major private sales this year at this level and above. But private sales don’t have a deadline. Others in this market say there are plenty of candidates, but the trick will be getting buyers to commit
in a way that will enable Sotheby’s to sell all three works in one sale.
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A conversation with the fair’s founder about relocating to the Breuer,
growing organically, and New York’s ongoing lack of cohesion between auction houses, art fairs, and galleries. |
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In the decade and a half since Elizabeth Dee founded the Independent
Art Fair, the show’s format has evolved, expanding from an emerging art fair into a semiannual event: The spring edition highlights emerging artists, while the fall edition focuses on modern art. It also moved from Chelsea to Tribeca, stopped in Brussels, then wound up at the Battery and Pier 36. As I wrote earlier this month from the fall fair at Casa
Cipriani, down by the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, it’s become an immersive experience, with most of the 30-odd booths dedicated to a single artist, and a focus on educating visitors.
But Dee told me she had always dreamed of bringing the Independent to the Breuer Building. So when the building was recently acquired by Sotheby’s, a vision for the fair’s next iteration began to coalesce. Dee is also hoping to grow the fair, and has been exploring the possibilities of operating on the
Upper East Side at a time when the neighborhood is experiencing a gallery renaissance. |
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Last week, Dee and I discussed all that and more: the bittersweet move from Casa
Cipriani, her “conscious” approach to growth, and her efforts to forge cohesion among fairs, galleries, and institutions. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. |
Marion Maneker: I’m sorry to see you leave Casa
Cipriani. What are your plans for the Breuer Building?
Elizabeth Dee: Casa Cipriani has been a nice venue. We were part of the grand opening program there in 2021. The opportunity to be there, and come back the way we did after the pandemic, seeded a lot of ideas around what a modern art fair could look like for a more contemporary audience in New York. So the building was a big part of the inspiration of how the Independent 20th Century fair came about originally. Our
hearts are very close to the Cipriani team, and it was an extraordinary opportunity to develop the show there for four years.
And it’s nice to start with 32 galleries, to work in such a focused way, with a core group, because it gave us a sense of what galleries have at their disposal in terms of good-quality material; what the platform can do for shaping those markets further; and what next-generation galleries are thinking.
We want to keep organically growing. So the move uptown
to Madison [next September] is going to be a wonderful way to expand that audience and build more galleries into the program.
Which came first—the desire to grow from 30 galleries to 50, or the interest in moving to the Breuer Building?
The Breuer has been a personal dream of mine for 15-plus years. And once that building started to change hands, it became more real in my imagination, how great it would be to actually curate a show there. But this move was
precipitated by the fact that we were ready to grow to the next stage. In order to grow, we were going to have to leave the Battery Maritime Building.
We’re really thinking through how we make New York strong post-pandemic, in a way that it should have been before the pandemic. In New York, we just don’t have cohesion between institutions, fairs, and galleries—and we should. [We’re thinking about] ways we can continue to cross-collaborate across sectors in order to bring New York to a
whole new level. So we needed to grow, but we also needed a collaborator who saw the potential.
I’m presuming that the attraction to the Breuer Building is the ability to make an art fair more accessible by putting it in a prominent location that people associate with art. There’s a built-in perception that this is a venue for people to come and see art, or arrive with some curiosity and be exposed to it.
And it’s in the heart of a really important and
interestingly evolving gallery neighborhood. The Upper East Side has always been a gallery neighborhood. It’s also Museum Mile. So we’re coexisting with two important aspects of what we do, and we’re in very close proximity to them. The gallery area in that neighborhood is undergoing a true renaissance and evolution, and it’s going to be a very exciting place to see exhibitions in the next five years. |
With 50 galleries, I think you can get enough weight to be an attraction. But I agree that
it’s always better to have more things going on, than trying to drive traffic by yourself.
Absolutely. I’m a big believer in competition and critical mass. I’m not a believer in scale. I don’t believe art encounters benefit from fairs that are 150-plus galleries. I believe we are human beings, and we have a cellular visual memory, and we can’t really remember or feel moved by work after a certain threshold. We all have different thresholds for that, of course, but there’s a human
limitation, and I think we have to honor that. |
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What you’re able to do at the 20th Century Fair is create a level of focus. It’s
not just that there are fewer booths, it’s that each booth has a very distinct message, presence, and explanation.
In this culture, with the access we have, we don’t need to go to trade shows to see 10 works by 10 artists. The opportunities that galleries have in good fairs are extraordinary. There are legacy-making opportunities if galleries put the time, focus, attention, and value on them. This is the place where you’re going to meet your new clients and sell to new museums. I
want to see galleries reach their full potential in this way, because this is the most open playing field for that competition, for a gallery’s talent to come through.
Some of the business status quo has kept a lot of exciting collectors and audiences from reaching this material. So I want to be part of that solution and that progression in any way I can. These voices are extraordinary. These stories are incredible. And a lot of this material is so fresh to the marketplace. Pricing and
valuation is quite fair in many of the areas we’re focusing on. The timing and circumstances are so perfect. We’re the only modern fair in New York, and for it to have this contemporary viewpoint, I think, brings it into a relevancy that we’re very excited to lead and continue developing with others.
You’re increasing your galleries by 50 percent; that’s a big jump. How are you thinking about that? What’s the process?
It’s going to be an interesting challenge to
curate the Breuer project. We’re taking over the entire building, so it will be important to get the staging right. We’ve always had far more galleries qualify to do the fair than we have space. But we’ve resisted growing too quickly, and it’s part of our vision to keep things on a conscious scale. We’ve been overwhelmed with the response since we announced this. It’s going to be a question of who and what, not a question of who’s interested. It’s still going to be
invite-only, as all of our fairs are. It’ll be nomination-based. My curatorial team and I have a lot of research to do, because the propositions are already coming in, and they’re phenomenal. We’re going to have to weigh not only individual projects, but also the collective experience for this audience, and how they’re going to encounter the show for the first time.
There’s a consideration of the historical territory. The 20th century is broad—you can have things from 1910 and from 1990.
So we have to think through where the representation should be. Getting earlier 20th century material is always a challenge; there’s less of it, and it’s hard to find works from other regions because of the political realities of that time and how things were preserved. The building itself is from the 1960s, so there’s also a question about how one addresses the era of the building and its relationship to the show. That’s an exciting problem to solve—intellectually, curatorially, and creatively.
That’s something I hadn’t had to think about in the Battery Maritime Building. |
That’s it for today. More on the Karpidas sale on Friday.
M |
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